Thomas More Quotes

This avidity alone, of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends, is insatiable, perpetual, universal, and directly destructive of society.

There is something about prosperity that brings out the worst in some people.

Mr. Greed, why do you have to own everything that you see?

A human being has a natural desire to have more of a good thing than he needs.

We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy. We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like.

I'm not technically rich, but I do have a lot of s**t that I don't need, that I refuse to share with others.

The pride of dying rich raises the loudest laugh in hell.

Most men have always wanted as much as they could get; and possession has always blunted the fine edge of their altruism.

The miser is as much in want of what he has as of what he has not.

I think one of the most pervasive evils in this world is greed and acquiring money for money's sake. Once you have six houses and a plane, it's just about a number. It's never been anything I understood.

As human beings, we're very materialistic and have all this stuff - furs and cars and diamonds and money.

No one likes to have less than they had before. That's the nature of the human animal.

Avarice, the sphincter of the heart.

There are still people in Japan who think money is something evil.

Anything you cannot relinquish when it has outlived its usefulness possesses you, and in this materialistic age a great many of us are possessed by our possessions.

I understand the human instinct to want to create a nest and possess things, to show them off, but for me personally, it became less and less interesting.

The trappings of lifestyle are often that; traps.

There is always greed. There is nothing wrong with greed.

The current public aspiration seems to be: Get what you can. Can what you get. Sit on the can behind gated fences.

Avarice is a deadly sin.

How many BMWs do you need? How many Rolex watches you gonna wear in your lifetime, for crying out loud? What is it about that kind of desire? I don't understand it.

I hate to say it - it breaks my heart - but we're a tacky, money-obsessed culture.

If we were to gain God's perspective, even for a moment, and were to look at the way we go through life accumulating and hoarding and displaying our things, we would have the same feelings of horror and pity that any sane person has when he views people in an asylum endlessly beating their heads against the wall.

Avarice is fear sheathed in gold.

That plenty should produce either covetousness or prodigality is a perversion of providence; and yet the generality of men are the worse for their riches.